"I had one young guy," Sadie said, "who spent the whole time just showing me the photographs of his mom and dad and his kid sister, telling me about them. Then you know what he did? He tried to lay me, but there was no spring in his step and he said, 'Shit, man, when am I goin' to grow up?' We both of us ended up crying in each other's arms, at least that's what I tried to make it sound like, but you know what I mean, people think this job don't carry any responsibilities, can you believe it?"

"La vie est pleine de surprises," I told her.

She squinted at me over a cigarette. "How's that again?"

"An old Chinese proverb." I asked if I could use her phone and she said okay and I rang the British Embassy and spoke only in French, asking them to get the cypher clerk out of bed. He came on the line after ten minutes and I gave him Jade One, the code-word for the mission, and put the whole thing across in routine speech-code because it was all I could do without a one-time pad and he wouldn't have one, taken ill for «blown» and confined to his room for "gone to ground", and so forth, Ferris would have a bloody fit when he got this one: there'd now been a total of four attempts on my life and I'd had to kill twice and now I was blown for the second time since I'd reached the field and we still hadn't got any access to the opposition. It was like a two-way mirror that only they could see through; I'd worked only once before in the Orient but I was beginning to remember how it felt: nothing is what it seems; your feet are on shifting sands and the images you see are only reflections and the sounds you hear are only echoes and the logical process of Western linear thinking takes you through shadows and leads you into the ethereal haunts of illusion until you start losing your grip, and then you're done.

Fatigue, of course. Have to brace up, you know. Spot of Horlicks and a sound night's sleep, that's all you need.

Not quite. I need some magic.

"Attendez, ce n'est pas tout." I asked for information on Soong Li-fei, spelling her name out in French, saying she was allegedly an interpreter for Korean Airlines. I asked for information on Soong Yongshen, allegedly her brother and dead by ritual murder in Pekin. I asked who Youngquist was.

I also reported that although Ferris couldn't have told anyone that my new cover was Clive Ingram and that I was booked into the Chonju Hotel in Seoul tonight, the opposition had sent a woman there to meet me, with a gun.

Some kind of magic, yes, was needed here, to arm me against theirs.

The rain beat on the tiles overhead and I gazed into the watchful eyes of Sadie, the whore from Memphis, her thick black lashes narrowed against the cigarette smoke that drifted between us on the sultry air of the room.

Who is Sadie?

She's just a whore from -

Are you sure?

Fatigue, yes, ignore.

"Bien, c'est tout maintenant. Je repete: Ji — a — de — eu, un."

I rang off.

"She no speaka da English?" Sadie asked me.

"That's right."

I asked her where I was to sleep and she took me to a small room at the back of the building with a single bed in it already made up and an electronic alarm clock on the bedside table showing the correct time and a plastic baseball trophy on the dressing-table underneath an array of faded silk flags and pennants — ASU Sun Devils, Cincinnati Reds, Dodgers — and a tin-framed photograph of a young man with a crew cut and a winning smile, with fly spots clouding the glass.

"This is Danny's room," she said, a warmth touching her voice and lingering. "That's him up there. He's my son. I keep everything ready for him, when he comes to see me."

"A handsome boy. When do you expect him here next?"

She turned away. "Oh, not yet awhile, I guess. Hasn't been here for a year or two — he keeps pretty busy, see, works for the Hertz people in Hong Kong, but he always calls me up at Christmas time, never misses. You be okay in here?"

"Yes." I asked her if she had an English-language newspaper and she found one for me from the kitchen, the Korean Herald of today's date. Front page headline: WORLD SHOCK AT SECOND ASSASSINATION IN PEKIN.

I said good night to Sadie and shut the door and opened the small window at the foot of the bed and did a quick survey as the rain cascaded from the clogged gutters into the street below. This was the second floor and there was a narrow balcony directly underneath; it looked as if it might collapse if I hit it too hard but that would be all right: it would break the fall. Telephone wires, drainpipe (out of reach and dilapidated), a rope of dead creeper, four windows overlooking this one, two of them curtained.

I shut the window against the din of the rain and got into bed and looked again at the paper. Picture of Omer J. Rice, US Ambassador to the People's Republic of China, shot to death yesterday by an unknown assailant as he was leaving the Embassy. Vice-President Liu Faxian orders ceaseless and untiring efforts to find and bring to justice those responsible for these monstrous crimes; photograph of Faxian. US Embassy placed under massive day and night police guard as CIA investigators are flown in from Seoul, Tokyo, Taiwan and the United States to assist ANFU, the Chinese security service, in their enquiries. Report from the Tass agency in Moscow declares China a country where the diplomats of other nations are no longer safe. The body of Ambassador Rice to be flown by special plane to his home town of Springfield, Massachusetts. Chinese government placed in difficult and precarious position by these mystifying acts of violence against the West.

And on page three a grainy picture of a young Chinese national, Soong Yongshen, who was the apparent victim of ritual murder on the steps of Huang Chiung Yu, the Temple of the God of Paradise. Police were said to be following certain leads indicating a possible connection between Soong Yongshen and the funeral bombing of yesterday morning that had killed the British Secretary of State. Picture: British Secretary of State.

I looked for a long time at the photograph, aware of a memory stirring. This man's face was like another I'd seen yesterday in Pekin, somewhere in the crowd at the funeral. But sleep was coming down on me like a dead weight and I folded the paper and dropped it onto the bedside table and switched off the lamp, listening to Sadie's husky and muted voice in the outer room saying sure, honey, it was a hell of a night to be out, and in any case she'd be out of town for the next few days visiting a sick friend on the coast, so they'd have to take a rain check, and Jesus, they could say that again and no kidding.

I lay in the dark with one or two last thoughts circling, trying to form an equation in my mind. I remembered now whose the other face was, the one that was rather like the British Secretary of State's: it was the American Vice-President's; I'd seen him among the mourners in Tian'anmen Square. To an Asian they would look identical. The lilting voice of Soong Li-fei was in these last thoughts, telling me something again, that her brother had "done something wrong, something to do with the dreadful thing in Pekin", where the police were said to be following leads indicating a possible connection… between Soong Yongshen… and the funeral bombing of yesterday morning…

Thoughts circling in the dark, nothing very coherent, long time no sleep. Perhaps Soong Yongshen had made… a mistake… of some kind… yesterday in the square where the flowers had gone whirling into the dark sky and come drifting down in waves of sleep… sleep…

I woke at first light and heard Sadie doing something in the kitchen and went out there to see her, giving her a shopping list: some clothes, shoes, toilet stuff, a street map of Seoul and a map of South Korea. The rain had stopped and we could hear shutters banging along the street as people opened up their shops.